Snow still clogs NYC streets, airports

NEW YORK – Hundreds of airline passengers were stranded for up to 10 hours on the tarmac at overworked Kennedy Airport. Ambulances struggled to get patients through unplowed streets. City buses sat abandoned in the snow.

The Christmas weekend blizzard proved to be the curse that keeps on giving Tuesday, as confusion and frustration snowballed in New York and the rest of the country.

Additional Photos

A city bus sits stranded in the street Tuesday amid snowbanks clogging a neighborhood in Brooklyn. On local highways, more than 1,000 abandoned vehicles had to be removed. The Associated Press

Officials warned it could take until New Year’s to rebook all passengers and straighten out the transportation mess created by the storm, which shut down all three of New York’s major airports for 24 hours and caused a ripple effect across the U.S.

A high school band from Pennsylvania faced the prospect of marching in the Rose Bowl parade in Pasadena, Calif., with only half of its musicians after the storm stranded the rest in Philadelphia. European tourists who planned to fly into New York found themselves in Chicago when their flights were diverted. Travelers as far away as San Francisco were marooned, even though they were headed nowhere near the Northeast.

New York’s airports struggled to get planes in and out. But some jetliners couldn’t even get to the gate.

At Kennedy, a Cathay Pacific flight that had been diverted to Toronto spent 10 hours on the tarmac, and a second Cathay Pacific plane with 250 people was still on the runway after eight hours as of Tuesday afternoon.

Passenger Abi Subramanian, 38, said supplies on the plane were running low and he was worried about his wife and 2-month-old daughter.

“We’re going to be in trouble very shortly. There’s no food left for her,” he told The Associated Press by cell phone.

More than 5,000 flights had been canceled since Sunday night at the three New York airports, about 1,000 of them on Tuesday alone.

The chaos was also reflected in New York’s streets. Hundreds of abandoned city buses and dozens of ambulances still sat in the middle of snowdrifts from the storm, which clobbered the city with up to 2 feet of snow. A video that instantly went viral on the Internet showed city crews accidentally smashing a parked car as they tried to free a city construction vehicle.

Brooklyn resident Annie O’Daly waited more than 30 hours for help after falling and breaking her ankle Sunday at around 8 p.m., said Jim Leonhardt, her husband. An ambulance didn’t arrive until 2:30 a.m. Tuesday. Leonhardt had to help paramedics carry her out onto the unplowed street and over a snowbank.

Some 1,000 vehicles had been removed from three major New York City-area expressways alone. In New Jersey, police in helicopters counted at least 60 vehicles stranded along a highway at the shore. Motorists were taken in National Guard Humvees and other vehicles to shelters.

In Asbury Park, N.J., a commuter train hit a tractor-trailer that got stuck at a railroad crossing. The driver had left the truck, and no injuries were reported.

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